reader – Page 2422

Hybrid Hard Drives Just Need 8GB of NAND

judgecorp writes “Research from Seagate suggests that hybrid hard drives in general use are virtually as good as solid state drives if they have just 8GB of solid state memory. The research found that normal office computers, not running data-centric applications, access just 9.58GB of unique data per day. 8GB is enough to store most of that, and results in a drive which is far cheaper than an all-Flash device. Seagate is confident enough to ease off on efforts to get data off hard drives quickly, and rely on cacheing instead. It will cease production of 7200 RPM laptop drives at the end of 2013, and just make models running at 5400 RPM.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
Hybrid Hard Drives Just Need 8GB of NAND

Australian State Bans IBM From All Contracts After Payroll Bungle

renai42 writes “If you don’t follow Australian technology news, you’re probably not aware that over the past few years, the State of Queensland massively bungled a payroll systems upgrade in its Department of Health. The issues resulted in thousands of hospital staff being underpaid or not paid at all, and has ballooned in cost from under $10 million in budget to a projected total cost of $1.2 billion. Queensland has now banned the project’s prime contractor, IBM, comprehensively from signing any new contracts with any government department, until it addresses what the state says are IBM’s project governance issues.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the article:
Australian State Bans IBM From All Contracts After Payroll Bungle

China Has a Massive Windows XP Problem

An anonymous reader writes “The Chinese are going to have a very, very hard time kicking the Windows XP habit. The deadline for the retirement of Microsoft’s most successful operating system ever is eight months from tomorrow: April 8, 2014. That’s the day when the Redmond, Wash. company is to deliver the last XP security update. According to analytics company Net Applications, 37.2% of the globe’s personal computers ran Windows XP last month. If Microsoft’s estimate of 1.4 billion Windows PCs worldwide is accurate, XP’s share translates into nearly 570 million machines. In the U.S., 16.4% of all personal computers ran Windows XP in July, or about one in six, Net Applications’ data showed. But in China, 72.1% of the country’s computers relied on the soon-to-retire operating system last month, or nearly three out of every four systems.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View article:
China Has a Massive Windows XP Problem

Researchers Unveil Genome of ‘Immortal’ Cell Line Derived From Cancer Victim

vinces99 writes “Scientists have unveiled a comprehensive portrait of the genome of the world’s first immortal cell line, known as HeLa, derived in 1951 from an aggressive cervical cancer that killed Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African-American woman. The cells, taken without her or her family’s knowledge, were pivotal in developing the polio vaccine, in vitro fertilization and cloning, and were the subject of a 2010 New York Times best-seller ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.’ The Lacks family has never been compensated and, until this new University of Washington study, has never had a say in how the information is used. The study, published Aug. 8 in Nature, pieced together the complicated insertion of the human papillomavirus genome, which contains its own set of cancer genes, into Lacks’ genome near an ‘oncogene, ‘ a naturally occurring gene that can cause cancer when altered. Scientists had never succeeded in reproducing cells in a culture until the HeLa cells, which reproduced an entire generation every 24 hours and never stopped. The cells allowed scientists to perform experiments without using a living human. The researchers discovered that the genome of the HeLa cell line, which has been replicated millions, if not billions of times, has remained relatively stable.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View article:
Researchers Unveil Genome of ‘Immortal’ Cell Line Derived From Cancer Victim

Netflix SuperHD, 3D streaming options pop up on Comcast, Verizon and other ISPs

Ever since Netflix introduced its SuperHD streaming with higher quality 1080p video and 3D support at CES in January, it’s been restricted to only ISPs participating in its OpenConnect CDN program. Tonight, either there’s some kind of glitch or that participation has been expanded, because users with previously unsupported ISPs are seeing SuperHD buttons on Netflix as well. We’ve been able to confirm it and even stream SuperHD and 3D video on previously unsupported ISPs like Comcast and Verizon. There are several reports on Twitter of people suddenly seeing the option as well, and we’ve contacted Netflix to see what’s going on. So far the company has not responded, but if you’ve been waiting for some higher quality streaming options, hit the test page to see if you have the green light then try it out on a SuperHD-ready device (PS3, Roku, Apple TV, Wii U, Windows 8 and some others). [Thanks, Tim] Filed under: Home Entertainment , HD Comments Source: Netflix

View original post here:
Netflix SuperHD, 3D streaming options pop up on Comcast, Verizon and other ISPs

Super-Flexible Circuits Could Boost Smartphones, Bionic Limbs

Nerval’s Lobster writes “The microelectronic sensors and mechanical systems built into smartphone cameras and other tiny electronic devices may soon evolve into microscopic, custom-printed versions designed as bionic body parts rather than smartphone components. Engineering researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a micro-printing process that can build microscopic microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) onto a flexible, non-toxic organic polymer designed for implantation in the human body. Current-generation MEMS are typically found in the accelerometers in smartphones, or the tiny actuator motors that focus cell-phone camera lenses. Most are made from substrates based on silicon, and built using techniques common to semiconductor fabrication. The new process, as described in the journal Microelectronic Engineering , relies on an organic polymer that is hundreds of times more flexible than conventional materials used for similar purposes. That flexibility not only makes the units easier to fit into the oddly shaped parts of a human body, it allows them to be made more sensitive to motion and energy-efficient. That alone would give a boost to the miniaturization of electronics, but the stretch and flex of the new materials could also serve as more comfortable and efficient replacements for current prosthetics that sense stimuli from an amputee’s nervous system to power a prosthetic arm, for example, or operate a synthetic bladder.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View post:
Super-Flexible Circuits Could Boost Smartphones, Bionic Limbs

A Speeding Ticket Camera Company Is Doctoring Evidence Photos

Nothing feels worse than getting a speeding ticket in the mail. What. The. Truck. As if they weren’t bad enough as-is, a report from the Washington DC metropolitan area suggest that the cameras used to catch you might not be playing by the rules. In fact, the camera contractors might be fudging the evidence to make sure you can’t challenge the tickets. Read more…

Follow this link:
A Speeding Ticket Camera Company Is Doctoring Evidence Photos

“Hand of Thief” banking trojan doesn’t do Windows—but it does Linux

The administration panel for Hand of Thief. RSA Signaling criminals’ growing interest in attacking non-Windows computers, researchers have discovered banking fraud malware that targets people using the open-source Linux operating system. Hand of Thief, as researchers from security firm RSA have dubbed it , sells for about $2, 000 in underground Internet forums and boasts its own support and sales agents. Its functionality—consisting of form grabbers and backdoor capabilities—is rudimentary compared to Windows banking trojans spawned from the Citadel or Blackhole exploit kits, but that’s likely to change. RSA researcher Limor Kessem said she expects Hand of Thief to become a full-blown banking trojan that includes more advanced features such as the ability to inject attacker-controlled content into trusted bank webpages. “Although Hand of Thief comes to the underground at a time when commercial trojans are high in demand, writing malware for the Linux OS is uncommon, and for good reason, ” Kessem wrote. “In comparison to Windows, Linux’s user base is smaller, considerably reducing the number of potential victims and thereby the potential fraud gains.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

First California AMBER Alert Shows AT&T’s Emergency Alerts Are a Mess

Mark Gibbs writes “AT&T’s implementation of the FCC’s Emergency Alerts System provides minimally useful information in an untimely fashion with little geolocational relevance. … Yesterday California got its first AMBER alert and my notification arrived at 10:54pm. It came up as panel over my lock screen and here’s what it looked like on my notifications screen: ‘Boulevard, CA AMBER Alert UPDATE: LIC/6WCU986 (CA) Blue Nissan Versa 4 door.’ The problem with this it that’s all there is! You can stab away at the message as much as you like but that’s all you get, there’s no link to any detail and considering the event it related to occurred over 240 miles away from me near to the Mexican border, the WEA service seems to be poorly implemented. Indeed, many Californians were annoyed and confused by the alert and according to the LA Times ‘Some cellphones received only a text message, others buzzed and beeped. Some people got more than one alert.’ I got a second copy of the alert at 2:22am and other subscribers reported not receiving any alert until late this morning.” It seems to have gone down about as well as New York’s. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some copiers randomly change the numbers on documents

In Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents , a computer scientist called David Kriesel shows that the Xerox WorkCentre 7535 randomly changes the numbers in its scans.

See original article:
Some copiers randomly change the numbers on documents

Ken May

Category: reader